Remember how liberalism was pronounced dead in 1994?

A trip down memory lane, to 1994: the words of another would-be prophet:

Liberal socialist welfare state died in Tuesday's election
Richard "Doc" Rioux • November 13, 1994

The Liberal Socialist Welfare State is dead! All over this country, the people have spoken. A political earthquake of January 17 proportions shook the land. Big Government Liberals sustained serious damage, and there isn't a retrofit program around that will restore the Liberal agenda.

The message handed the Democrats in almost every state was that there must be no more Haiti adventures, no more waste in government. It was an angry message, a loud, resounding message, a fiercely determined message...

The people have had enough, and they want a change in direction. They want smaller government, less government intrusion in their lives, more politicians who place the common good before partisan politics and re-election, protection of the family, and an end to gridlock.

The election of November 8, 1994 will go down in history as a major turning point, a watershed in American politics, a moment in time when the people went to the polls with a common voice to demand change in the way their government works. And Republicans were the beneficiaries.

...Democrat Tom Foley lost his seat in Washington State and will be replaced as Speaker of the House of Representatives by feisty Republican Newt Gingrich of Georgia. Even Texas' popular Democrat Governor Ann Richards was upset by Republican George W. Bush, son of the former president...

...Is Bill Clinton in trouble? Yes, he is. You had better believe it. In 1992, candidate Bill Clinton talked about being a New Democrat and moving his party from the left. He pushed for more social engineering programs and made getting abortions and fetal research easier to do. He raised taxes, proposed big government answers to health care reform, and appointed people like Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders to office who advanced condoms in elementary schools and the legalization of drugs. Mr. Clinton floundered in foreign affairs, then took us into Haiti without congressional approval or support from the American people...

Last Tuesday's election should be regarded as a clarion call to Liberals who still dominate the courts, the mass media, U.S. schools and universities, and film and television programming. The left-wing "political correctness" and social permissiveness they've foisted on us for forty (years) are no longer tenable. The average American believes in God, in the institution of marriage, wants family values promoted, and wants performance standards raised in schools and in the workplace.

For the better part of forty years, Democrats controlled Congress. The challenge to the now dominant Republicans for the next two years will be to deliver on their promises to the American people. If Republicans do, they can retain power. If they don't, Ross Perot is waiting on the balcony to form and finance a third party.

And the Red Sox will never win the World Series.

Okay, so this guy got one wrong—who can blame him? So did millions of other conservatives. All the organs of conservatism—the National Review, Human Events, the American Spectator, and of course, Rush Limbaugh and the hundreds of Limbaugh knockoffs all over America—crowed loud and long over the death of liberalism. “The generations of liberal rule have ended, once and for all--the generations to come, the future will be conservative!”

But the conservative revolution wasn’t a sea change in American politics; it was a political hiccup that was quickly dispelled after the disastrous and corrupt performance of the conservatives in power. Gingrich, Dole, D’Amato, DeLay all went to their political graves—Perot? A-hahahaha-ha, Perot… The despised Clintons, who’ve had their epitaphs written more times than any other American politicians, have survived them all.

And so has the liberal state. Twelve years after this article appeared, the leading candidates for president produced by the GOP are all liberal Republicans much to the dismay of the shrunken conservative faithful. (Marginalized by their own party, rank-and-file conservatives bear bumper stickers with the legend: “No Rudy McRomney!”) Seventeen months before the election, the GOP hasn’t produced even one viable, credentialed conservative capable of competing against a liberal Republican, much less a Democrat. And their twelve year reich—is gone.

But it was not the Democrats or the liberals who destroyed it. Never make the mistake of over-estimating the public mandate for liberalism. No—it took Republican conservatives in the White House to destroy conservative dominance of American politics.

(Footnote: Who was the author? Nobody famous. According to his web page, Richard "Doc" Rioux wrote a weekly column for The Signal (Santa Clarita Valley, California) from 1993 to 1997. A leader in his community of Stevenson Ranch (Los Angeles County), Founder of Old Town Newhall, USA, Executive Director of two of the nation's largest alcohol and drug treatment facitlities at Acton and Warm Springs, and an acclaimed author and photographer, Dr. Rioux died on April 28, 1997 at the age of 53.)